Atlas(t): MechWarrior Online Has A “Release” Date

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Even though we live in the Future Year of 2013 and download all games directly to our spinal cords the second they hit pre-pre-pre-post-mid-alpha-gramophonic, we still insist on designating games as “released” or “un-released”. I understand that up to a point – it paints expectations of relative bugginess, when developers should start charging money, etc – but could we maybe start using more, um, applicable terminology? Otherwise we end up with games like MechWarrior Online, which is finally “releasing” in September even though it’s been available for more than a year. (Yes, I know a slight discrepancy in lingo is the least of the gaming industry’s problems, but JUST LET ME HAVE THIS ONE, ‘KAY?)

To celebrate the impending upgrade to version 1.0, Piranha has gotten everybody in open beta – what else – a mech! The newest addition is called the Dragon Slayer, and you can watch it do things (none of which involve slaying dragons, sadly) below:

The 1.0 update will come on September 17th, and it’ll trundle in atop a fire-red carpet of 46,941,487 mech corpses, according to Piranha. The developer further noted that all those laser-fried heaps could stack to the moon and back 1,221 times, because it clearly has no respect for the robo-dead. Also because big numbers woooOOOoooOOOoo.

But yes, MechWarrior Online seems to be doing quite well for itself, which is wonderful news. Is it your stompy stomy bang bang game of choice, or are you more of a Hawken sort? I suppose Titanfall’s also looking rather scrumptious, but it’s probably still a ways off. Regardless, giant robots! There are many. Which is your favorite?

Community Warfare is allegedly coming before release, and the F2P is very well done indeed. Ignore the bittervets. It needs some work, but it’s looking very good, the base stompy robot gameplay is excellent.

I haven’t touched the game in just over 2 months. It got very boring without any purpose. Random matched deathmatches ad nauseum. Ugh. Where did you find any info on the status of community warfare?

Overall my feelings on this game are mixed. I think some of their priorities are wrong (3PV pfffffft). It’s nice that they are trying very hard to balance the mech combat but they should have made a go at community warfare by now so they could start refining it. Instead it’s being dropped last minute before “release” and my hopes for it aren’t very high. We’ll see if it’s enough to convince me to come back.

edit – and the lack of VOIP is astounding, they are saying it won’t be added by release either… who is in charge over there???

They have claimed that they may get Phase 1 of CW in right around launch, but they told us will just be faction tags and nothing more. The real meat of CW is slated for 2014. Maybe you should try keeping up with the development. Go listen to the NGNG podcasts. In the latest one of the Devs says that they have thrown the time line out the window.

And that it’s been released for ages, regardless of how much they or the golden fanbase may want to stick their fingers in their ears and cry the opposite, because they’ve been taking people’s money for ages.

A game was made available with content for money. You have to be several kinds of crazy to not call that “released”.

Still. Maybe if you’re lucky they won’t utterly shaft the balance or netcode again between now and then. PGI’s development process seems to involve flailing on the keyboard, releasing a patch, then waiting several months to go “oh, I guess that didn’t work after all” and trying again. They are the least competent for-money game programmers I’ve seen and, yes, I am counting Troika and various bedroom indies using GameMaker.

Which is frustrating, because FlyingDebris’ interpretation of the mech designs is lovely, and there’s a core of a really good big, ponderous, locational-damage-and-positioning-and-stuff mech game struggling to get out from under all PGI’s uselessness and monetization.

Pretty much this. It’s a crying shame that their community is happy to let them get away with radically redefining the commonly accepted usage of the term “beta” as an excuse to cover a questionable business model combined with some godawful development choices and some terrible management.

It’s not that people are okay with it (some pocket holders are, but I digress). It’s that PGIGP doesn’t care. They stopped listening to their fanbase months ago. It certainly feels like they are now just trying to get something out the door to recoup some of their losses.

It’s no mystery. They got a huge pipeline. Think that they just stopped because? They got good-copped into stopping and moving their human resources over to MWO. Guess what happened if they said no? I hate to break it to you, but MWO is an organization maximizing it’s profit in every way possible (micropayments, ..). Then look at MWLL. It was (and is) a larger, better product. In a word: It was a threat. Cease and desist would have followed, I bet my ass on it. Please inform yourself on the mechlivinglegends forums. Or believe the propaganda. Your choice.

Let’s not degenerate the discussion with talk of silly conspiracy theories.

Look, I loved MWLL as much as the next person. I was one of those people who had absolutely zero interest in Crysis and yet bought Crysis wars or whatever it was called just to play MWLL. I feel I got my money’s worth. Back when I used to play it was around v0.4.3 or 0.4.6, I dont remember exactly. The point is, back then MWO was no more than that Mechwarrior 5 CGI video and MWLL had no serious competition for online mechwarrior gameplay (unless you want to count the cesspool that was Mektek MW4 Mercs online multiplayer, the one with the lets-somehow-strap-4 heavy guass rifles-on-a-mech-and-nothing else as serious). Even back then, the most amount of people that I can remember seeing was two full servers and two almost empty with only 4 dudes fooling around servers.

Seriously? That’s your threat? the one that was going to bring down MWO?? and against what? a Free-to-play game that you can download anytime and you dont have to pay a penny to play if you dont want to, let alone have to bother with actually paying money for another game that you have no interest in just to play it’s mod? a mod that at it’s best days couldn’t have possibly had more than 200 people online at the same time? (and that’s a very liberal estimate by the way) I am sorry, but to say that somehow MWLL could have been a financial threat to Piranha is most likely unrealistic.

Ok I understand you are sad about MWLL. I am sad too, because like you, I too think that there are things MWLL did better than MWO. However I also think that there are things that MWO does better, which is why I honestly hope that the ex-modders were indeed hired by Piranha so that they can combine their expertise with that of Piranha’s. But the point is, let’s not let our emotions cloud our better judgment and reasoning.

If a handful of mobsters walk into your store and tell you that you really should sell because they are worried about fires in the area spontaneously taking out buildings, and you sell at a decent profit, you still just got shaken down. MWO shook them down. They looked at that nice little mod, ran their finger through the freshly dried paint, and said, “This sure does look a lot like a superior version of our game… tell you what, how about you close down this game based on our IP and come work for us?” If the threat wasn’t explicate, it certainly was implicate.

Apparently we need to use inappropriate smiley faces, so let me try:

MWO, a crappy “F2P” game in “beta”, shook down and killed MWLL, a good game. :)

MW3 was worst game of the series. Basically arcade mechquake. And Quake3Arena was evolution of great shooter thus ended up as a great game, while MW after brilliant MW2 (oriented more at simulation) instead of focusing on what is good turned out to be clusterfucked crap.

They must really be in dire financial straits. I really wanted this game to succeed, even got the (cheapest) founder package. Have been playing at least once a week since the closed beta but haven’t touched the game for a good two months now. I’m really bored by now by what essentially Solaris Online. This isn’t Mechwarrior, these are silly arena fights, repeated ad nauseum with no reason or higher reward behind it. That’s what really turned me off from the game. I don’t even need to get into the numerous problems the game has otherwise, technical and mechanically.

Because they “release” their game before it’s finished? Community Warfare was supposed to be a pretty big part of the game. Heck, it even was one of their “design pillars” detailed way back pre beta. And now they make it seem like something that can be patched in quickly afterwards.
And no, to me Mechwarrior is much more than arena matches. It should feel like you are in a legitimate war setting, combined arms, proper missions, attacker and defender roles, the lot. Simple deathmatches may be fun for a while, but i think the Battletech setting to be wasted on such simplicities.

Yes, did you read anywhere that they would release it without Community Warfare? I would be interested in knowing where, then, because it doesn’t say so here on this site, or on their own site. And the impending 1.0 is almost 3 months away, since impending is apparently quite relative.

Considering their usual development pace, 3 months will give them the time to add one map, 2 hero mechs for moar moneyz and correcting the huge bunch of mistakes they will invariably have made with their poor decisions and terrible way of balancing things.
At this point I really don’t expect much more from CW than “winning a game will increase control by 0.1% in an hex somewhere on a map”, ala Star Conflict.

I sincerely believe a great game can come out of it all in the end, but not before a couple of years, you have to admit that PGI is distressingly incompetent.

No, i didn’t read it anywhere, i just go by the developers previous track record. Even when they would add it in right now, with PGIs glacial patching process i don’t see how it would be fit for release until september. I also don’t think were quite there contentwise for CW. There just aren’t enough different maps to handle galaxy wide conquest.

There’s nothing glacial about their development process. It’s you and others like you, who are absolutely ignorant about how you go about developing a project of this size.

But that’s OK, we can’t all be all software developers or have insight into everything in the world. We can, however, try not to act like complete fucking douchebags unable to contain our teen-angsty emotions of manly internet man rage.

Maybe because you don’t get to play other developers’ games at this early a stage :) But then, there’s the whole new way of doing business so we get to play games early all the time these last couple years, noone is here hating on League of Legends for having done so etc. or their tech and devs being complete noobs at handling what they have :) No, let’s just hate on the little studio with a small niche game, that’s the way we go about things here!

Look at Path of Exile, then, developed by Grinding Gear Games. Little studio, you could play the game since beta and all, so we’re pretty much in the same comparison range. Guess what? They’re working both better and faster. You really ought to remove those blinders, my good man.

@PoulWrist Look moron, the devs themselves already said CW would be AFTER launch. Phase 1 which will consist of picking faction tags MAY possibly make it in before launch, but everything else is slated for after launch. Try looking yourself before getting teen-angsty and acting like a douche.

That’s fair. CW is probably gonna be a huge clusterfuck. But I think concentrating on making the core robotshoot experience is the right move, because there’s no point in having a great metagame and a terrible game.

MWLL is great, but quite ugly by comparison with MWO. I haven’t played it enough to compare the balance decisions.

Excuse me Sir, but I have to countermand you exactly at the beauty comparison of MW:O vs. MW:LL and just HAVE to leave below-standing link which has both games in the same resolutions (2880×1620, some in 3840×2160).

To celebrate the impending upgrade to version 1.0, Piranha has gotten everybody in open beta – what else – a mech! The newest addition is called the Dragon Slayer, and you can watch it do things (none of which involve slaying dragons, sadly) below:

That’s a bit misleading, you make it sound like the Dragonslayer is a free thank you for participants of the beta, which it is not! It is just another hero-mech which you have to buy for $$$ if you want to call it your own. The regular variants will join the roster in two weeks time.

Noticed that too. Also, the article says that there is no slaying of dragons, when one is clearly taken down in the course of the video. Not to mention, it was highly likely one of the killed pilots was a Kuritan. :]

I’ve never been one to spend my hard-earned in F2P games, but even with that the cost of mechs and meaningless cosmetic tat in MWO is astonishingly high. 6500 ingame credits cost $30, and that’s still not enough to buy some of the premium mechs.

That aside, it’s basically World of Tanks with a more restricted P.O.V. and even more grind.

No. In world of tanks only a certain range of tiers is viable for making money, namely tier 4-6, with a few exceptions and premium tanks of course. In MWO every mech is on an even economical footing and there are no astronomical repair costs which prevent you from actually playing that mech without paying for premium time. The grind in WOT is definitely higher than it is on MWO and the pricing for premium mechs and tanks is comparable.

I tried to get into it but damn it was a real messy thing, and it wasn’t worth the poor latency for ‘Stralian players either. As far as I’m concerned Living Legends still is my favourite online MW experience, and the free Mektek MW4 Mercs online, coop and all is still a hoot with friends.

Alright don’t belive I am going to say this but Hawken has become my cup of tea when it comes to getting my mech fix. Ive played every MW made and after playing MWO it just bores me to tears. The combat just trudges too slowly for me now and lord do I hate the dam launcher its just butt ugly smeared with all kinds of ads to buy mechs and premium time and what not. I get it its F2P and they have to make money some how but there is a right way to do it and the wrong way.

Holy hell there’s a bunch of misery guts on here. MWO is great fun, the bundle they have on offer is great value ($20 gets you 3 mechs and the mech bays for them and a month of premium time), the real-money only mechs are hardly pay-to-win (some are pay-to-lose, like the Commando) and they address many issues (not ALL the ones that are whined about in the forums, but then again people whine about the fixes in a NERF RET kind of way) in the bi-monthly patches.

The Launcher has ads the same as every other F2P launcher I’ve used, once you’re in the game Mechbay there is a small link to buy currency.

Well, to be specific, it gets you three variants of one mech, and the prime config of that mech has 4 ballistic slots and one ct energy hardpoint. I mean, I guess if you thought the Spider 5K was great but wished it had no jump jets and even less armor, this thing will really be your cup of tea. It’d be one thing if the $20 got you three battlemasters, or one of each chassis, or you got to pick, but really, it’s not that exciting.

Don’t even get me started on the mechbay slots, either. I can’t even fathom how people are willing to not only buy the mech for $30 and are totally okay with having to buy the space for it too. That’s really the very least they could do.

That said, yes, they have done a very good job of avoiding a pay-to-win system, although it took some serious bludgeoning from the community to make sure, in the case of consumables.

I played this for a while during “closed beta” and it was fun, though the rubberbanding got to the point of making the game unplayable, and the FoM boat builds got slightly tedious, supersonic commandos were fun though! It’s a shame that there is no factional warfare yet and the game is still just deathmatch, as I was interested in this for the potential galaxy spanning conflicts. At least I didn’t sink any money into the game.

Instead of moaning about something that is still deep in Beta country (and might be able to surprise some of you in the next few months), I suggest to all you Mechwarrior fans going here link to forum.mechlivinglegends.net and getting your Mechwar fix real quick.
RockPaperShotgun Company, move out !